Importing a terrain created in zbrush

[artbywaqas]

What's the best way to apply collision detection... to a vast irregular area terrain created in max with detailing done in zbrush?


In other words its a huge map with lots of irregularities. Of course the zbrushed details will be brought in as a normal map.

[Odedge]

I will take a guess, but I presume this will be a static mesh that was create from a plane (in max)? If so, I think your only option is to use "per poly collision". If so, you will have to uncheck the 3 lowest boxes in the static mesh editor.

I guess you could create a lot of collision boxes in Max, but more than likely it work well as the player will probably be walking too high above the visible mesh.

Though I would wait for a more experience response.

[crazyfingers]

Not sure how high poly your mesh is, but i'm pretty sure you could just duplicate the terrain and overlay it and rename the new mesh "UCX_terrain". Export them together as a acii file type, like usual. The naming convention tells UT3 that that's the collision for the terrain. Careful not to make it too complex, usually the simpler the Collision mesh, the better.

[Odedge]

I am presuming the terrain was made from a plane. If that's the case, doesn't the "UCX_" shapes have to be 3 dimensional? There is no reason to have the collision mesh be the exact same shape as the visible mesh. If that' the case, just set the mesh to have "per poly" collision.

Also keep in mind that if any part of this mesh terrain is seen, the entire thing will be rendered. Depending on the polys of it and the map in general, this can cause problems. The terrain actor in the editor works differently and only the "visible" parts of it are rendered.

[ambershee]

A 'vast' terrain mesh is probably a very bad idea as far as UT3 is concerned - especially if it is detailed. If your mesh is more than around 20,000 triangles, you should really (really) be looking at using a terrain actor instead.

[mslaf]

Importing a terrain created in zbrush

What's the best way to apply collision detection... to a vast irregular area terrain created in max with detailing done in zbrush?

I looks that your terrain wasn't done in zbrush using spheres but in max, so the question should rather be about importing terrain as a mesh (static mesh) and its collision. You won't be able to import anything beyound 50k triangles so zbrush HD geometry is out of the question.

Terrain is very general term - it may be flat it may be bumpy it could mean rocks, caves, mountains, cliffs etc. In most cases it's a mix of the terrain actor and static meshes. It's because terrain meshes are uniqe and require the modeller to cooperate closely with the level designer while the terrain actor is very flexible and each level designer can handle it individually. For custom made maps that are unique you can use what you'd like.

For terrain based on static mesh the best would be per-poly collision for all flat areas + custom collision models for the places with the most complex geometry.

Using only custom collision primitives for such shapes would be very hard - if not impossible. In the best scenario you would end up with 1000 collision meshes for 2000 poly terrain mesh.

Normally each native terrain system splits the terrain mesh into pieces - quads in most cases. This allows to shorten the rendering queue and lower geometry level for the pieces that are far away. The same can be done for the terrain based on static meshes with pretty good results but it all depends on the map layout.

BTW:

DGUnreal explained each collision type very precisely in one of the posts, search the forum if you want to know more about it.